Posts filed under online music

A recent case study on YouTube emphasizes the role that widget marketing played in the phenomenal growth of YouTube as a destination site for video sharing. YouTube was not the first mover in its space, but in a market that was fragmented and plagued with sites with poor user experience, it quickly made inroads with its innovative widget based marketing and social networking features.

Dhingana is one site to watch out for in online Indian music streaming space. We mentioned briefly about them here. The current incumbents Raaga and MusicIndiaOnline (both among most visited Indian sites) hardly seem to be doing any innovation at all. Dhingana is a refreshing change in this space and with their simple interface and rich features that promote stickiness and viral spread, I think they are moving in the right direction. Although a word of suggestion for them is it would be nice to avoid displaying those bright flash ads smack in the middle of the page that according to me hurts the otherwise nice user experience that they provide.

Talking about the new features, at Dhingana you can add tags, categories on songs, create smart lists. Another cool feature is their recently launched widgets which users can put up on their sites and share their smart lists with their site visitors, just like people share youtube videos on their blogs/sites. This is one viral feature, which if takes off can go a long way in making their brand a common place and eventually help make Dhingana a destination site for all Indian music needs. From the point of view of business, this also helps them create an infrastructure which can be useful to do deals with other sites that wish to provide streaming music on their site and even make money (with revenue sharing deals). We talked with team dhingana about some of these features. Find a below a quick excerpt from the talk we had with them around their launch of music widgets. Feel free to share your thoughts and ask questions about Dhingana’s strategy as they will be happy to answer some of them for us. Here is a sample widget

1. Can you give us a quick overview about how the new widgets feature that Dhingana is launching will work?
Dhingana’s 360Widget is like a sleek battle tank . It ‘s designed to be extremely light but at the same time loaded with a lot of features. 360Widget is a plugin that users can embed in their webpages/ blogs to showcase personal favorite songs as well as current chartbuster Indian songs. Visitors of the pages can listen to these songs if interested. Thus, web page owners / bloggers can express their musical likings through the widget at the same time, potentially make money out of this. More details here.

2. Are you doing deals with any Indian sites to use your widget and do revenue sharing etc.?
3. Why would users want to use your widget on their sites/blogs? Are you targeting any particular group of people/sites? What rate of adoption from users do you expect?Let us answer 2. and 3. together. Well, Dhingana is a site where you can musically entertain yourself, it caters to your musical buds. Our 360Widget will allow a site or blog owner’s users to do the same. So by embedding this widget on your blog or website, it can add a new dimension to your blog, where people might like to listen to the owner’s SmartLists or some nice music while they enjoy reading your blog or website.
One can compare this widget with Flickr’s Photo widget or Yahoo’s news widget. People normally embed a Flickr Photo Widget to showcase their own photo albums. Similarly like-minded people can choose to embed 360Widget to showcase their own SmartLists and in turn allow their users to share songs and smartlists with their friends.

Second reason, which is the more interesting one, is moving forward we have a revenue model in the making where the blog owners can choose to embed audio ads in their widgets. Once they do this, Dhingana can share some percent of the revenue from these audio ads with the bloggers. However, we are still researching around this model and depending upon its feasibility, we positively plan to integrate it in our 360Widget. Once this goes through, we definitely plan to partner with other sites.

4. Infrastructure can become the bottleneck if this feature really takes off and spreads virally. I am sure you realize this - how do you plan to address this?We always make sure that we operate at 50% of our streaming bandwidth capabilities. This means that if our users are consuming 1000GBs per month, then we atleast have 2000GB bandwidth capability. This allows us to be always prepared for sudden growth or surge in user base.

In addition, to start with we are just allowing our registered users to embed this widget on their sites and blogs. Once the widget goes out of beta phase, we plan to make it available to non-registered users as well.

5. Anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Dhingana’s approach has always been to create a niche for itself through innovation and technology. We want to add value by enhancing the music listening experience of users and add the “feel good” factor to their experience by allowing them to express and share their likings. We know that users like our work, and we are thankful to them for their even greater support as they are spreading Dhingana’s name by the word of mouth.
We love surprises and we are sure our users like them too!  Stay tuned as we have loads of exciting features in pipeline to take the music listening experience to the next level.